Planetside Software Forums

We're close to releasing Terragen 3.4. We want to run a short beta testing stage before general release, and we need your help.

We are looking for:

20 users on Windows

20 users on Mac OS

You must be willing to use the beta for at least an hour during the next week, using it as you normally would use Terragen, and report any bugs or problems to us. If you don't think you'll have time, please give someone else the chance.

If you're interested and you agree with the above, simply reply to this post with either "Windows" or "Mac". Do not reply for both.

This is "first come, first served". We will send downloads links to Terragen 3.4 Beta to the first 20 people to reply for each platform.

Hi, this is a real question and not me trying to be funny... Are we sopped to try and break this thing, or just use it normally?

So, normal pops, or real geo as moss on every inch of terrain kinda testing? What specifically would staff like us to use?

Use it how you would normally use it, but try to test a wide variety of things. Mostly I want to get a random sampling of normal usage and see if the new version has any bugs that it didn't before. But stress tests could be useful too, and if they turn up any strange behaviour we'll try to figure out whether it's cause by a bug or just a limit of the hardware.

Near as I can remember this is the first real beta since 1.9.0.3.1. And it's a limited beta. Just curious, why is this version different? Other than being the last likely version of Terragen 3, I mean.

Near as I can remember this is the first real beta since 1.9.0.3.1. And it's a limited beta. Just curious, why is this version different? Other than being the last likely version of Terragen 3, I mean.

The alpha testers usually test every release candidate before it becomes a general release. However, this time around we didn't get enough feedback. For most of the testers it was a downgrade from Terragen 4 Alpha, even though it's an important update to TG3.

Just saved a test render of an older file in TG3.4 beta and it saved automatically in .bmp...thought that had changed to .tif in this version or did it default t the older version.

If you're just saving a render from the Render View, it will save with the format you choose in the file save dialog. This defaults to whatever you have set in Preferences: File Saving. In your case it's probably still set to BMP. The 3.4 update won't change this setting for you. I recommend changing this to TIFF 8-bit-LZW as it saves a lot of disk space compared to BMP.

The new default setting mentioned in the change log only affects the settings on the render node's "Sequence/Output" tab ("Output image filename" and "Extra output images") which are used by the buttons "Render All To Disk" and "Render Sequence". Also, the only time this default matters is when TG initially sets up these filenames when creating a new project or new render node, so it won't change an existing project that you loaded.

Just saved a test render of an older file in TG3.4 beta and it saved automatically in .bmp...thought that had changed to .tif in this version or did it default t the older version.

If you're just saving a render from the Render View, it will save with the format you choose in the file save dialog. This defaults to whatever you have set in Preferences: File Saving. In your case it's probably still set to BMP. The 3.4 update won't change this setting for you. I recommend changing this to TIFF 8-bit-LZW as it saves a lot of disk space compared to BMP.

The new default setting mentioned in the change log only affects the settings on the render node's "Sequence/Output" tab ("Output image filename" and "Extra output images") which are used by the buttons "Render All To Disk" and "Render Sequence". Also, the only time this default matters is when TG initially sets up these filenames when creating a new project or new render node, so it won't change an existing project that you loaded.

Matt

D'oh, shoulda sussed that but I'm off my feed today it seems...thanks Matt

Happy to report that the opacity channel maps load on first use of an imported .obj. Went back to an old TG2 project and reloaded the house with no glass and just the glass separated out first after deleting the original so it was a first load in TG3.4 and you can see from the yellow-orange light coming out the opacity maps worked and the glass is nicely reflecting where appropriate. I'm uploading the image to Image sharing as there seems to be no way from here. Default Street...... will be in the title.

So I wanted to be an asshole just this once and clicked "Render image" while TG was already rendering an image. A message popped up that the program is already rendering so I clicked ok.

The render froze for a moment and timer stopped to count the time. Then I clicked pause and when I unpaused it the timer did not show up again. I have "Rendering..." message with no time count to be seen. :P

When the render was complete the final elapsed time showed the point when I interrupted rendering._______________________

Also, upon saving I entered diacritic marks (ą, ś, ć to be specific) and got the message...

3.4 Crashes in Windows in the following situation :Begin a render with that has multiple populations that normally take two or three minutes to populate.Without waiting for the population progress window to finish Close out the preview windowImmediately Minimize the Terragen windowImmediately Minimize the Render window

The small population windows continue to pop up on the screen with the percentage of completion. Then there is a crash, seemingly upon the last population popup completing.

I only found this out when intending to leave the house and have the render running for several hours and wanting to have the computer screen not updating while the render proceeded.Leaving all Terragen widows up on screen until the populations are done lets the render complete normally.

3.4 Crashes in Windows in the following situation :Begin a render with that has multiple populations that normally take two or three minutes to populate.Without waiting for the population progress window to finish Close out the preview windowImmediately Minimize the Terragen windowImmediately Minimize the Render window

(...)

I only found this out when intending to leave the house and have the render running for several hours and wanting to have the computer screen not updating while the render proceeded.Leaving all Terragen widows up on screen until the populations are done lets the render complete normally.

True - this happened to me to. When I clicked through various windows while populating, minimized them etc. I got crashes about 20% of the time.

Actually this has been an issue in previous releases as well. Probably it's not wise to move or play with any windows before populating is done...

Matt and Oshyan, is there a deadline you want results by? No issues here so far.

We hope to make the release within the next couple weeks, the sooner the better. We need to give adequate time for testing, but in the end not everything can possibly be tested, and the most important thing is that things are improved vs. the previous version, and no new issues are introduced. So far I think that is generally what we are seeing. These population crash issues are something we'll look into, but it sounds like 3.4 is no worse in that regard than 3.3 was, at least. And if that's the case I don't know if it would be considered a "blocking" bug for the 3.4 release. It's something we'd ideally fix, but he circumstances of that crash are pretty specific and avoidable at the same time.

You post it as part of your reply here in this thread. Click the Reply button at the bottom and then below the post text box you'll see Attachment settings. I'm confused, you post images all the time in Image Sharing... Maybe you're not allowed to post images in here as a regular user. Let me look...

Yes, it's going to look the same, only larger. I thought you asked for a larger preview, that's all. If you adjust the settings of the cloud layer, for example increase Depth or Density, you should see something show up in the preview. As I said it is only because of how thin and low-density the default 2D cloud layer is.

The 3.4 version is just out, so I guess it's no beta testing anymore, but using (and testing) ;)

I got no notification of an update and the updater says there isn't one so I guess I'm reporting a bug of sorts...I have no spherical or birds eye cameras on my drop down....damned inconvenient having to to sk\mall test renders to see where the image was at. I wasn't even aware there was a spherical camera for that matter.